Table 4.
Exemplar Quotes from Caregivers in the Prepare to Care Intervention.
| Theme | Exemplar quote |
|---|---|
| Advantages of Prepare to Care intervention participation | |
| Developed self-care skills | “I liked that it told you, taught you, showed you that it’s okay to worry about yourself too. And to help keep yourself organized and try not to completely freak out over every little thing and the way it taught you to kind of calm down, and focus, and meditate, and just chill out for a while.” (Participant 2, 56) |
| “I think communicating with others was good because it kinda helped me, I wouldn’t say venting, but it helped me to get some of my emotions out by talking about it with other people.”(Participant 9, Age 61) | |
| “It helped me tremendously. It helped me learn how to relax and cope with it.” (Participant 3, 44) | |
| Increased awareness of their own needs | “Knowledge is power, so if I can have something to hold on to and, you know, know that it’s gonna help me, even the breathing techniques and things like that, it covered so many different areas. . . that sometimes caregivers might, you know, put themselves aside or their needs aside, but this sort of really brought it all to the forefront, so, no I was really fortunate to have had this experience.” (Participant 11, 58) |
| Normalized their own feelings | “Just knowing that what you’re feeling is natural, I guess you could say” (Participant 6, 41) |
| “My naked feelings were okay” (Participant 1, 58) | |
| Better equipped to help patient | “I was able to read those modules, and, just educate myself, not just for my benefit, but for his. I would know what to expect or, I felt like I had great resources that helped me help him.” (Participant 11, 58) |
| “. . .from the first minute I heard, my brother say that he had cancer, you sort of don’t know where to start. it’s sort of like an atom spewing out all these electrons I guess. but having that information eventually, just sort of brought it all together, and maybe. . . it gave me as we as my siblings the opportunity to sort of focus our energy better, rather than just going randomly to help.”(Participant 11, 58) | |
| Easy to participate in intervention | “I found it easier to take care . . . to do the intervention . . . while taking care of him. I didn’t feel any guilt while doing that. Taking the time. But other things, I mean, to the point of feeling guilty for being able to eat food.”(Participant 7, 44) |
| Challenges associated with Prepare to Care intervention participation | |
| Unable to use information at the time of participation | “Definitely, there was so much useful information in there. None that I necessarily could use at the time as I was going through it but that I will definitely access now that we’re almost through this part of the journey, that I can calm down and settle down and look at it and use it.”(Participant 8, 58) |
| Desire for more in depth information | “Some of them, I was like, ‘Okay, you know, maybe deeper in depth on some of the topics’.” (Participant 7, 44) |
| Challenging to remember to engage in intervention | “Between work and then with his schedule and everything else. . .but with everything else, you know, picking up the household slack and everything, sometimes it was just hard to remember.” (Participant 7, 44) |